Like many of us, I’ve been stuck indoors without much to do for the past month or so. Unfortunately, I’m also in the process of moving, so I don’t know anyone in the local area and most of my ‘maker’ equipment is in storage. But there’s not much point in sulking for N months straight, so I’ve been looking at this as an opportunity to learn about designing and implementing FPGA circuits.

I tried getting into Verilog a little while ago, but that didn’t go too well. I did manage to write a simple WS2812B “NeoPixel” driver, but it was clunky and I got bored soon after. In my defense, Verilog and VHDL are not exactly user-friendly or easy to learn. They can do amazing things in the hands of people who know how to use them, but they also have a steep learning curve.

Luckily for us novices, open-source FPGA development tools have advanced in leaps and bounds over the past few years. The yosys and nextpnr projects have provided free and (mostly) vendor-agnostic tools to build designs for real hardware. And a handful of high-level code generators have also emerged to do the heavy lifting of generating Verilog or VHDL code from more user-friendly languages. Examples of those include the SpinalHDL Scala libraries, and the nMigen Python libraries which I’ll be talking about in this post.

I’ve been using nMigen to write a simple RISC-V microcontroller over the past couple of months, mostly as a learning exercise. But I also like the idea of using an open-source MCU for smaller projects where I would currently use something like an STM32 or MSP430. And most importantly, I really want some dedicated peripherals for driving cheap addressable “NeoPixel” LEDs; I’m tired of needing to mis-use a SPI peripheral or write carefully-timed assembly code which cannot run while interrupts are active.

But that will have to wait for a follow-up post; for now, I’m going to talk about some simpler tasks to introduce nMigen. In this post, we will learn how to read “program data” from the SPI Flash chip on an iCE40 FPGA board, and how to use that data to light up the on-board LEDs in programmable patterns.

The LEDs on these boards are very bright, because you’re supposed to use PWM to drive them.

The target hardware will be an iCE40UP5K-SG48 chip, but nMigen is cross-platform so it should be easy to adapt this code for other FPGAs. If you want to follow along, you can find a 48-pin iCE40UP5K on an $8-20 “Upduino” board or a $50 Lattice evaluation board. If you get an “Upduino”, be careful not to mis-configure the SPI Flash pins; theoretically, you could effectively brick the board if you made it impossible to communicate with the Flash chip. The Lattice evaluation board has jumpers which you could unplug to recover if that happens, but I don’t think that the code presented here should cause those sorts of problems. I haven’t managed to brick anything yet, knock on wood…

Be aware that the Upduino v1 board is cheaper because it does not include the FT2232 USB/SPI chip which the toolchain expects to communicate with, so if you decide to use that option, you’ll need to know how to manually write a binary file to SPI Flash in lieu of the iceprog commands listed later in this post.

Across the globe, people seem to enjoy decorating their homes, communities, and outdoor spaces with lights and ornaments during the winter holidays. Maybe it helps with the depressingly early sunsets for those of us who don’t live near the equator. Anyways, I thought it’d be fun to make some ornaments with multi-color addressable LEDs last year, and I figured I’d write about what worked and what didn’t.

I didn’t have many microcontrollers at the time because I was visiting family for the holidays, so I ended up coding the lighting patterns for a cheap little STM32F103 “black pill” board which was in the bottom of my backpack. And it’s a convenient coincidence that I just started learning about the very similar GD32VF103 chips with their fancy RISC-V CPUs and nearly-identical peripheral layout, so this also seems like a good opportunity to write about how to cross-compile the same code for two different CPU architectures.

Pretty holiday stars! “Frosted white” acrylic sheets aren’t the best way to diffuse light, but they are cheap and easy to work with.

This was a fun and festive project, and it might not be a bad way to introduce people to embedded development since there are so many ways to drive these ubiquitous “NeoPixel” LEDs. Sorry that this post is a little bit late for the winter holidays – I’ve been traveling for the past few months – but maybe it’ll get you thinking about next year 🙂

I’ll talk about how I assembled the stars and what I might do differently next time, then I’ll review how to light them up with an STM32F103, and how to adapt that code for a GD32VF103. But you could also use a MicroPython or Arduino board to set the LED colors if you don’t want to muck around with peripheral registers.

For the past few years, there has been growing excitement about the RISC-V instruction set architecture. It is an appealing architecture because it is open-source (which can mean royalty-free), and flexible enough to be configured for everything from small power-efficient microcontrollers to fast and complex application processors. In this post, we’ll learn how to write a simple program for a GigaDevice GD32VF103 chip, which leans towards the “small and power-efficient” end of the spectrum.

There have already been a handful of opportunities for hobbyists to use RISC-V hardware in their projects, such as the SiFive “Freedom” chips and Kendryte K210 modules. But the SiFive boards are expensive and (up until this point) produced in limited quantities, and most of the cheaper options have been narrowly focused on niches like machine learning or IoT applications. The GD32VF103 is still fairly new, and while there’s no guarantee that it won’t end up in history’s dustbin of one-off chips, it is an affordable general-purpose chip with a few tricks up its sleeve which should make it a nice learning platform.

First, it is easy to buy a handful of boards which use these chips: you can buy “Longan Nano” boards for about $5 from Seeed Studios, and they also sell compatible USB/JTAG debugging dongles. The GD32V chips have decent support for flashing and debugging, with a fork of DFU-utils to upload code over USB and a fork of OpenOCD to open a debugging connection to the chip. I hope that support for these chips is eventually integrated into the core projects, but in these early days, you’ll have to build patched versions.

There is also a HAL repository with C code to help you access the chip’s peripherals, but one more reason why this chip is an appealing learning platform is that its peripherals work very similarly to those found in the venerable STM32F1 family of microcontrollers. So while you can use the vendor-provided HAL, you can also get a head start on writing your own drivers by migrating code written for older STM32F103 chips, even though they have a different CPU architecture! How cool is that? 🙂

If any of that sounds interesting, keep reading – we’ll use the “Longan Nano” board that I mentioned above as the target hardware for this blog post, but the first few sections should apply to most boards that use a GD32VF103 chip. We’ll start with the basic boot/startup code which is needed to get to the ‘main’ method in a C program, then we’ll configure a few GPIO pins to toggle the on-board RGB LEDs. After that, we’ll set up a hardware interrupt to generate timed delays using the CPU’s timer peripheral (similar to ARM’s SysTick). Finally, we’ll set up DMA with the SPI peripheral to draw to the board’s 160×80-pixel display.

We’ll write some basic startup code for the chip, then set up its GPIO and SPI peripherals to light up the on-board LEDs and display.

I’ve written a little bit in the past about how to design a basic STM32 breakout board, and how to write simple software that runs on these kinds of microcontrollers. But let’s be honest: there’s still a bit of a gap between creating a small breakout board to blink an LED, and building hardware / software for a ‘real-world’ application. Personally, I would still want a couple of more experienced engineers to double-check any designs that I wanted to be reliable enough for other people to use, but building more complex applications is a great way to help yourself learn.

So in this post, I’m going to walk through the process of designing a small ‘gameboy’-style handheld with a GPS receiver and microSD card slot, for exploring the outdoors instead of video games. Don’t get me wrong, you could still write games to run on this if you wanted to, and that would be fun, but everyone and their dog has made a Cortex-M-based handheld game console by now; there are plenty of better guides for that, and many of those authors put a lot more time into their designs and firmware than I ever did.

Assembled GPS Doohicky. I left too much room between the ribbon connector footprint and the edge of the board on this first revision, so the display couldn’t fold over quite right. Oh well, you live and learn.

The board design isn’t too complicated, but there are several different parts and it gets easier to make small-but-important mistakes as a design gets larger. It mostly uses peripherals that I’ve talked about previously, but there are a couple of new ones too. The display will be driven over SPI, the speaker uses a DAC, the GPS receiver talks over UART, the battery and light levels will be read using an ADC, and the buttons will be listened to using interrupts. But I haven’t written about the USB or SD card (“MMC”) peripherals, and those will need to go in a future post since I haven’t actually worked them out myself yet. Note that SD cards can technically use either SPI or SD/MMC to communicate, but the microcontroller that I picked has a dedicated SD/MMC peripheral, and I wanted to learn about it.

Several years ago, a company called Future Technology Devices International (FTDI) sold what may have been the most popular USB / Serial converter on the market at the time, called the FT232R. But this post is not about the FT232R, because that chip is now known for its sordid history. Year after year, FTDI enjoyed their successful chip’s market position – some would say that they rested too long on their laurels without innovating or reducing prices. Eventually, small microcontrollers advanced to the point where it was possible to program a cheap MCU to identify itself as an FT232R chip and do the same work, so a number of manufacturers with questionable ethics did just that. FTDI took issue with the blatant counterfeiting, but they were unable to resolve their dispute through the legal system to their satisfaction, possibly because most of the counterfeiters were overseas and difficult to definitively trace down. Eventually, they had the bright idea of publishing a driver update which caused the counterfeit chips to stop working when they were plugged into a machine with the newest drivers.

FTDI may have technically been within their rights to do that, but it turned out to be a mistake as far as the market was concerned – as a business case study, this shows why you should not target your customers in retaliation for the actions of a 3rd party. Not many of FTDI’s customers were aware that they had counterfeit chips in their supply lines – many companies don’t even do their own purchasing of individual components – so companies around the world started to get unexpected angry calls from customers whose toy/media device/etc mysteriously stopped working after being plugged into a Windows machine. You might say that this (and the ensuing returns) left a bad taste in their mouths, so while FTDI has since recanted, a large vacuum opened up in the USB / Serial converter market almost overnight.

Okay, that might be a bit of a dramatized and biased take, but I don’t like it when companies abuse their market positions. Chips like the CH340 and CH330 were already entering the low end of the market with ultra-affordable and easy-to-assemble solutions, but I haven’t seen them much outside of Chinese boards, possibly due to a lack of multilingual documentation or availability from Western distributors. So at least in the US, the most popular successor to the FT232R seems to have been Silicon Labs’ CP2102N.

It’s nice to have a cheap-and-cheerful way to put a USB plug which speaks UART onto your microcontroller boards, so in this post, I’ll review how to make a simple USB / UART converter using the CP2102N. The chip comes in 20-, 24-, and 28-pin variants – I’ll use the 24-pin one because it’s smaller than the 28-pin one and the 20-pin one looks like it has some weird corner pads that might be hard to solder. We’ll end up with a simple, small board that you can plug into a USB port to talk UART:

Drivers for the CP2102N are included in most popular OSes these days, including Linux distributions, so it’s mostly plug-and-play.

It’s worth noting that you can buy minimal CP2102N boards from AliExpress or TaoBao for about $1, but where’s the fun in that?

If you choose to pursue embedded development beyond the occasional toy project, it probably won’t take long before you want to design something which runs off of battery power. Many types of devices would not be useful if they had to be plugged into a wall outlet all the time, and power efficiency is one of the biggest advantages that microcontrollers still have over application processors like the one in a Raspberry Pi.

When you do move an application to battery power, you’ll quickly discover that it is very important for your device to be able to A) charge its battery and B) alert you when its battery is running low. Not knowing whether something has hours or seconds of life left can be really annoying, and trying to use a nearly-dead battery can cause strange behavior, especially if the battery’s power drops off slowly as it dies. Most lithium-based batteries also last longer if you avoid fully discharging them – there’s some good information about lithium battery aging in this article.

So in this post, I’m going to go over a very basic circuit to power an STM32 board off of a single lithium-ion battery and monitor its state of charge. I will also talk briefly about how to add a simple battery charger to your design, but you should always independently verify any circuitry which interacts with lithium batteries! This circuit seems to work to the best of my knowledge, but don’t take my word for it; it’s very important to double- and triple-check your li-po battery circuits, because they can easily become serious fire hazards if they are handled improperly. It’s also good practice to avoid leaving lithium-ion batteries unattended while they are charging, and you should try to get batteries with built-in protection circuitry to help mitigate bad situations like over-current, under-voltage, etc.

So with those brief and not comprehensive safety warnings out of the way, let’s get started! I’ll use an STM32L4 chip for this example, but the ADC peripheral doesn’t seem to change much across STM32s. And here is a GitHub repository containing design files for a simple board which demonstrates the concepts described in this post.

It has been about nine months since ST released their new STM32G0 line of microcontrollers to ordinary people like us, and recently they released some new chips in the same linup. It sounds like ST wants this new line of chips to compete with smaller 8-bit micros such as Microchip’s venerable AVR cores, and for that market, their first round of STM32G071xB chips might be too expensive and/or too difficult to assemble on circuit boards with low dimensional tolerances.

Previously, your best bet for an STM32 to run a low-cost / low-complexity application was probably one of the cheaper STM32F0 or STM32L0 chips, which are offered in 16- and 20-pin TSSOP packages with pins spaced 0.65mm apart. They work great, but they can be difficult to use for rapid prototyping. It’s hard to mill or etch your own circuit board with tight enough tolerances, and it’s not very easy to solder the chips by hand. Plus, the aging STM32F031F6 still costs $0.80 each at quantities of more than 10,000 or so, and that’s pretty expensive for the ultra-cheap microcontroller market.

Pinout and minimal circuit for an STM32G031J6 – you only really need one capacitor if you have a stable 3.3V source.

Enter the STM32G031J6: an STM32 chip which comes in a standard SOIC-8 package with 32KB Flash, 8KB RAM, a 64MHz speed limit, and a $0.60 bulk price tag (closer to $1.20-1.40 each if you’re only buying a few). That all compares favorably to small 8-pin AVR chips, and it looks like they might also use a bit less power at the same clock speeds. Power consumption is a tricky topic because it can vary a lot depending on things like how your application uses the chip’s peripherals or what voltage the chip runs off of. But the STM32G0 series claims to use less than 100uA/MHz, and that is significantly less than the 300uA/MHz indicated in the ATTiny datasheets. Also, these are 32-bit chips, so they have a larger address space and they can process more data per instruction than an 8-bit chip can.

Considering how easy STM32 chips are to work with, it seems like a no-brainer, right? So let’s see how easy it is to get set up with one of these chips and blink an LED.

As someone who likes both electronics and the outdoors, sometimes I get anxiety about a lack of electricity. It would be nice to go camping somewhere away from it all, and still be able to charge things and run some lights, a display, maybe a small cooler. I’m sure some of you are rolling your eyes at that, but I’ve also been wanting to play with adding aftermarket indicators to old cars, like backup sensors or blind spot warnings, and it’d be nice to run them off a separate battery to avoid the possibility of accidentally draining the car’s battery overnight.

Since low-power solar panels are fairly cheap these days, I figured that it might be worth buying a few to mount to my car’s roof. And since my car is technically a pickup, it was very easy to put the battery in the bed and run the wiring through the canopy’s front window:

I’ve secured the battery a bit more since taking these pictures, but this is the basic idea – it’s pretty simple.

If you have a different kind of car, I’d imagine that you could just as easily put the battery in your trunk, but you might need to drill a hole for the wires if you don’t want to leave one of your windows cracked open.

I guess that a lot of this guide won’t apply exactly to your situation, because you’ll have different dimensions to work with, different limitations, and probably different solar panels. But I hope that laying out each step that I took and what worked for me might be helpful – your basic approach could probably look very similar.

And before we go any further, please keep your expectations in check. These panels can only produce up to 100W in direct sunlight, which is nowhere near enough power for something like an electric vehicle. So read on if this sounds interesting, but the car still runs on gas. We’re not saving the world here.

I’ve written a few basic tutorials about bare-metal STM32 development in the past, and even though I’m still learning as I write them, I think that there’s enough groundwork to start covering some ‘real world’ scenarios now. I’d like to start with a very important technique for designing efficient applications: the Direct Memory Access (DMA) peripheral. DMA is important because it lets you move data from one area of memory to another without using CPU time. After you start a DMA transfer, your program will continue to run normally while the data is moved around ‘in the background’.

That’s the basic idea, but the devil is always in the details. So in this post, we’re going to review how the three main types of STM32 DMA peripherals work. Different STM32 chips can have similar peripherals which behave slightly differently, and usually more expensive / newer chips have more fully-featured peripherals. I think that this is how the peripherals are grouped, but I didn’t test every type of STM32 chip and corrections are always appreciated:

‘Type 1’ Simple DMA: F0, L0, F1, L1, F3, L4

‘Type 2’ Double-buffered DMA: F2, F4, F7

‘Type 3’ DMA + DMA multiplexer: G0, G4, L4+

Once we’ve reviewed the basics of how DMA works, I’ll go over how to use it in a few example applications to show how it works with different peripherals and devices. The required hardware for each example will be discussed later, but I’ll present code to:

Generate an audio tone by sending a sine wave to the DAC peripheral at a specific frequency.

Map an array of colors to a strip of WS2812 or SK6812 ‘NeoPixel’ LEDs.

Map a small region of on-chip RAM to a monochrome SSD1306 OLED display.

Map a a region of RAM to an ILI9163C or ILI9341 TFT display.

The key to these examples is that the communication with an external device will happen ‘in the background’ while your microcontroller’s CPU is doing other things. Most of the examples won’t even use interrupts; the data transmission is automatic once you start it. But be aware that DMA is not magic. Every DMA ‘channel’ or ‘stream’ shares a single data bus which is also used by the CPU for memory transfers, so there is a limit to how much data you can actually send at once. In practice this probably won’t be a problem unless you have multiple high-priority / high-speed DMA transfers with tight timing requirements, but it’s something to be aware of.

Rust is a fairly new language that has gotten to be very popular in recent years. And as the language matures, it has started to support a wider set of features, including compilation and linking for bare-metal targets. There is an excellent “Embedded Rust” ebook being written which covers the concepts that I’ll talk about here, but it’s still in-progress and there aren’t many turn-key code examples after the first couple of chapters.

The Rust language is less than 10 years old and still evolving, so some features which might change in the future are only available on the nightly branch at the time of writing; this post is written for rustc version 1.36. And the language’s documentation is very good, but it can also be a little bit scattered in these early days. For example, after I had written most of this post I found a more comprehensive “Discovery ebook” which covers hardware examples for an STM32F3 “Discovery Kit” board. That looks like a terrific resource if you want to learn how to use the bare-metal Rust libraries from someone who actually knows what they’re talking about.

As a new Rustacean, I’ll admit that the syntax feels little bit frustrating at times. But that’s normal when you learn a new language, and Rust is definitely growing on me as I learn more about its aspirations for embedded development. Cargo looks promising for distributing things like register definitions, HALs, and BSPs. And there’s an automated svd2rust utility for generating your own register access libraries from vendor-supplied SVD files, which is useful in a language that hasn’t had time to build up an extensive set of well-proven libraries. So in this post I’ll talk about how to generate a “Peripheral Access Crate” for a simple STM32L031K6 chip, and how to use that crate to blink an LED.

It’s kind of fun when languages have mascots, especially when they’re CC0-licensed.

The target hardware will be an STM32L031K6 Nucleo-32 board, but this should work with any STM32L0x1 chip. I also tried the same process with an STM32F042 board and the STM32F0x2 SVD file, which worked fine. It’s amazing how easy it is to get started with a new chip compared to C, although you do still need to read the reference manuals to figure out which registers and bits you need to modify. This post will assume that you know a little bit about how to use Rust, but only the very basics – I’m still new to the language and I don’t think I would do a good job of explaining anything. The free Rust ebook is an excellent introduction, if you need a quick introduction.

I was thinking of trying to write a better parsing script, but before diving into that rabbit hole I took another look at open-source PDF-parsing programs and found Tabula. It is an MIT-licensed utility with one goal: extracting tables from PDF files. And it seems to work very well with ST’s datasheets.

Tabula has a nice local web interface which gives you previews of the table data that it will export from a PDF.

Step 1: Download Tabula

Tabula runs on Java, so it’s simple to set up on just about any platform. They have good installation instructions on their website and GitHub readme file. If you are using Linux, you can download and unzip the tabula-jar-<version>.zip version of the latest release to get a runnable JAR file.

Following the instructions in the README.md file, once you unzip the file and cd into its tabula/ directory, you can start running a local server with the command that the readme file suggests:

java -Dfile.encoding=utf-8 -Xms256M -Xmx1024M -jar tabula.jar

Once it starts up, you should be able to navigate to http://127.0.0.1:8080 in a browser to access the Tabula UI. There is also a command-line version of the project, which will probably be better for setting up an automatic process. But for now, it’s nice to use the visual selection tools which the UI provides.

When you want to pick a microcontroller for a project, it can be useful to have a bunch of quick references to find the smallest/cheapest one that will fit the parts you want to use. Usually the information is freely available in datasheets, but those are usually PDF files with pinout/peripheral information spanning several pages.

So I’ve been playing with ways to partially automate the process of generating some nice reference images. I’m not exactly happy with what I have yet, but it’s not the sort of thing that merits spending a ton of time on, and I think I scripted away enough of the tedium that it isn’t too frustrating to make these sorts of tables. You wind up with reference images like this:

STM32L031Gx Pinout / Peripherals

Honestly, this post would be sort of moot if I could find nice CSV files or spreadsheets of STM32 pinouts and peripherals (see below). Maybe other vendors distribute information in that format, but I couldn’t find many for ST’s chips. And that means that I ended up with a sort of convoluted process.

A fragile Python script runs the pdftotext utility to convert an STM32 datasheet into a pinout table containing peripheral information. The automatic formatting doesn’t include table cell boundaries, so I couldn’t figure out how to put all of the peripherals associated with a pin on the same line quickly; someone needs to manually perform that step before running a second Python script which generates LaTeX files representing formatted peripheral tables. The PDF files generated by pdflatex can then be imported into Inkscape, where the table columns can be connected to the pins on an image of the chip’s outline. So, let’s get started!

Note: I ended up finding a better way to parse STM32 datasheets using a project called Tabula – see this newer post for more information. My first attempt presented in this post ended up working pretty poorly, but that’s life for you. Sometimes it takes a few tries to find a good solution.

The ESP32 modules sold by Espressif are very popular in the IoT and embedded development space. They are very cheap, they are quite fast, they include radios and peripherals for WiFi and Bluetooth communication, and in some ways they even appear to bridge the gap between MCU and CPU. And Espressif provides pre-built modules with built-in antennas and external Flash memory, both of which appear to be required for general-purpose ‘IoT’ application development. They can be a bit power-hungry when they are using their wireless communication modules though, and I haven’t found much information on how to develop ESP32 applications without using the heavyweight (but very functional and well-written) “ESP-IDF” toolchain which is distributed by Espressif.

Usually, avoiding bulky and proprietary HALs is a worthwhile goal in and of itself. But Espressif has actually released their ESP-IDF toolchain under a very permissive Apache license, and it looks like a well-thought-out system with solid ongoing support. So if you are looking at starting a new project with the ESP32, I would personally recommend using the ESP-IDF to save time and effort. But sometimes it is nice to learn about how chips work at a deeper level, and ESP-IDF projects are often quite large, and they can take a long time to build depending on your environment.

The large code size also discourages what appears to be one use case that the chip was designed for: to load new instructions into RAM every time that it reboots from an external ‘socket’. The current crop of ESP32 modules use a SPI Flash chip as that ‘socket’, but if you put them in a factory or a field you might want to use Ethernet, or RS-232, or who knows what. I’m not sure how extensible the chip’s ROM bootloader actually is yet, but let’s take a look at what it takes to get a simple C program running on the ESP32 without using the ESP-IDF build system.

Unlike the STM32 and MSP430 microcontrollers which I have written about previously, there are not many software tools available for the ESP32 core. The ESP32’s dual-core architecture uses two ‘Xtensa LX6’ CPU cores which Espressif licenses from Cadence, and I haven’t seen them in any other mainstream microcontrollers. It looks like a core that is intended to be customized for the needs of an application as a step between general-purpose microcontrollers and something like an ASIC, so maybe it is more common in application-specific environments than general-purpose ones. In this case, it looks like the specific application which Espressif chose is wireless communication, and apparently a lot of the WiFi and Bluetooth code is burned directly into the ESP32’s ROM.

The ESP32 also looks more like a proper CPU than many microcontroller cores, with a few hundred kilobytes of on-chip RAM, a 240MHz top speed, an MMU, and support for up to 8 process IDs (2 privileged / 6 unprivileged) per core. People used to make do with much less, but since the ESP32 is complex and somewhat unique, Espressif provides the only toolchain that I know about which can build code for it. That means that while this tutorial will not use the full ESP-IDF development environment, it will still use Espressif’s ports of GCC and OpenOCD for compilation and debugging, as well as their esptool utility for formatting and flashing the compiled code. The target hardware will be either the ESP32-WROVER-KIT board which includes a JTAG debugging chip, or any of the smaller generic ESP32 dev boards (such as the ESP32-DevKitC) combined with an FTDI C232HM cable.

And like most of my previous tutorials, the software presented here is all open-source and you should be able to build and run it on the platform of your choice. It won’t have any colorful LEDs this time – sorry – but the code is available on GitHub. I’m also still learning about this chip and there is a lot that I don’t know, so corrections and comments are definitely appreciated. So if you’re still interested after those disclaimers, let’s get started by building and installing the toolchain!